Travel Blogs from Dengfeng

Today started with a nice breakfast and then we left hotel for Tianamen Square and the Forbidden City Tianamen Square is huge and a 3 hour line for the locals to walk past and see an entombed Chairman Mao. The forbidden city holds 9 palaces and was still a place for the Emperor until 1924. There were about 3000 concubines living in the Forbidden City. Girls of 12-13 became the Emperors concubines. Went to a restaurant for lunch and a ...

Great night sleep at hotel then left for Yellow river. China is in worst drought for 63 years so wasn't much of the Yellow River to see. Interesting though we went to the spot where the Chinese exploded their dam as a last ditch attempt to stop the Japanese invasion. 900 00 people died and 4.1 million Chinese were displaced from the resulting floods. Japan did retreat but it was worse than dropping a bomb on the ...

Today was really good. We started in laoyong which was the Capitol of China during Tang Dynasty. We went to a Carriage Pit museum and Charlie our very very loud and fast talking guide which gets so excited spittle comes out of his mouth kept talking about what we thought was a "cherr.y pit" museum so the whole bus was thinking we were going to eat cherries it was so funny. When we got there it was a tomb with horses skeletons and chariots ...

... written in Chinese, after many questions and dialog, he eventually got the point and dropped us off at the station. It was the wrong station, but the clerk sold us tickets, then walked us the 200 meters or so to the right station. First class treatment for the round eyes. From here we boarded the bus to Xian. We ran into a little traffic Luoyang. After sitting on the freeway for 3 hours an accident was cleared and we were on our way to city of terra cotta ...

... volume at the station consisted of the people who got off of our train. Wondering around the massive and completely empty concrete structure definitely had a creepy vibe about it, but I'm happy to report no axe murdering occurred.

Getting around a country where almost no one speaks English and the signs are in an undecipherable alphabet has been a challenge, but nowhere near as tough as we expected. When they see ...